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Laura Carlsen On Living Juarez: Collateral Damage In Mexico’s “Drug War”

Laura Carlsen’s presentation, Living Juarez: Collateral Damage in Mexico’s ‘Drug War,’ held on Friday, April 8 was a very successful event. The presentation began with Carlsen, who is Director of the Americas Program of the Center for International Policy, based in Mexico City, screening a 20-minute documentary/work in progress titled Living Juarez that she is co-producing. In December 2006, during his first week in office, Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared war on the drug cartels. Since then, close to 30,000 people have died in Mexico as a result of the “War on Drugs.” Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, is now considered the deadliest city in the world, where close to 7,000 people have died since March 2008. An estimated 10,000 security officers currently patrol the streets of Cd. Juárez, while the violence continues to escalate. Living Juárez looks at the community response to the massacre of a group of youth attending a birthday party in the Juárez neighborhood of Villas de Salvárcar.

The film was followed by a 45-minute presentation in which Carlsen discussed various aspects of the War on Drugs in Mexico, US drug policy, and the crisis and militarization of Mexican society as a whole. Overall Carlsen sought to correct many common misconceptions. Finally Carlsen answered questions, and there was a lively discussion.

Carlsen has been a political analyst and writer in Mexico for over twenty years and has written extensively on trade, security, immigration and gender issues in Mexico, Colombia, and the Americas. She is the author of “A Primer on Plan Mexico” and has been working closely for twenty years with U.S. and Mexican groups to develop facts-based assessments and explore alternatives.

For more information on the film and CMP, visit: http://chiapasmediaproject.org/cmp/living-juárez-collateral-damage-mexicos-drug-war

For more information on CIP Americas Program, visit: www.cipamericas.org

The event was hosted by the UNC Department of Anthropology, the UNC Institute for the Study of the Americas and the UNC curriculum in Global Studies.

Jesús Emilio Tuberquia On Struggling For Peace Amidst War: A Courageous Experiment In Non-Violent Resistance

The “Struggling for Peace amidst War: A courageous experiment in nonviolent resistance” a talk by Colombian Community Leader Jesús Emilio Tuberquia on the experience of the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated Peace Community of San José de Apartadó held April 4th, 5:30 PM, Global Education Center drew about 60 people, including a mix of undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and non-UNC community members. The event opened with a commemoration ceremony to remember all those killed in wars around the world. Tuberquia proceeded with a lecture of about an hour, which was followed by a question and answer period. For the past five decades, a civil war has raged in Colombia, ensnaring civilians into the middle of the violent conflict. In 1997, eight hundred small farmers claimed their territory as a neutral civilian community and refused to cooperate with any armed group of any form (including military or police). Surviving threats, massacres, the disappearances of over 170 community members and food blockades perpetrated by various armed actors, the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó has succeeded in building a nonviolent community in resistance. The event was a great success, in terms of attendance and the opportunity itself for the UNC community to be joined by a leader of a grassroots community directly engaged in resistance to militarization and displacement.

The event was hosted by the UNC Institute for the Study of the Americas and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and supported by the curriculum in Global Studies.

British Studies In Transition: The National, The Global, And The Transnational—A Symposium

british in transitionGlobal Studies was proud to support a stunning symposium hosted by the Departments of History at Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Susan D. Pennybacker, professor of History and affiliate of Global Studies, spearheaded the project from UNC-Chapel Hill, along with her colleagues from Duke, Susan Thorne and Philip Stern.

On March 17th and 18th, a small group of academics engaged in breakthrough work in British Studies and related fields traveled to the Triangle to discuss the contemporary transitions that “British studies and imperial history” are undergoing both here in the US, and abroad. The event featured two panels of three scholars each. Each panelist presented a 25 minute talk that highlighted his or her own work and commented on the future of the field, the relationship between domestic studies and scholarship on the post-colonial, and the success of interdisciplinary perspectives on the shifting terrain of “British Studies.”  Speakers included: Margaret Hunt, professor at Amherst College, speaking on European soldiers and sailors in seventeenth-century South Asia; Durba Ghosh, professor at Cornell University, speaking on imperial liberalisms with regards to India in the period between the wars;  Jonathan Hyslop, visiting professor at Colgate University, speaking on race, labor and war in the Dominions between 1901 and 1971; Philippa Levine, professor at the University of Texas-Austin, speaking on colonialism and culture in the Empire;  Deborah Nord, professor of English at Princeton University, speaking on the location of home in fiction from Anita Desai and Nadine Gordimer; and Timothy Parsons, professor at Washington University in St. Louis, speaking on identity and the end of Empire from an Africanist perspective.

The symposium was presented and sponsored by: the Department of History at UNC Chapel Hill, the Department of History at Duke, the Dean’s Office of the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC Chapel Hill, the Center for European Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, and Global Studies at UNC Chapel Hill,  and their co-sponsors: the Center for European Studies at Duke University, the James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence in Graham Memorial at UNC Chapel Hill, the North Carolina Consortium for South Asian Studies, the Department of English at UNC Chapel Hill, the Women’s Studies program at Duke, the Department of English at Duke, the Department of Women’s Studies at Duke, the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke, the Center for African and African-American Research at Duke, the African Studies Center at UNC Chapel Hill, the Concilium on Southern Africa (COSA), and the Department of Asian Studies (UNC Chapel Hill).